A priest originally from Paksé was appointed by Pope Francis to lead the small Catholic community in the Laotian capital; resumes the legacy of Card. Ling Mangkhanekhun turned 80 last April.
Vatican City () – On the eve of Christmas, the small Church of Laos celebrates its new bishop. Pope Francis today announced the appointment of Fr. Anthony Adoun Hongsaphong, priest of the Apostolic Vicariate of Pakse, as the new Apostolic Vicar of Vientiane, the country’s capital. The pontiff has chosen him to continue the legacy of Louis-Marie Ling Mangkhanekhoun, the first cardinal of this tiny Catholic community that has barely 60,000 faithful throughout the country, who was elevated to the purple in 2017 and last April He turned 80 years old.
Father Hongsaphong has until now been a professor at the National Major Seminary of Thakeh and responsible for the pastoral care of the 11 mission stations of the Apostolic Vicariate of Paksé, the city in the south of the country where he was born on April 4, 1964. Ordained priest in In 1994, he completed his studies at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland and at the Angelicum in Rome. After a few years of pastoral experience in Thailand between 2005 and 2014, he was rector of the Pastor Bonus preparatory seminary in Paksé.
In Vientiane, he will exercise his ministry in a territory inhabited by 2.5 million people, where Catholics are barely 0.6% in a context of overwhelming Buddhist majority. The center of community life is the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, built in 1929 by the Paris Foreign Missions before the communist regime closed its doors to the presence of foreign missionaries in the country.
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